So for our second hour tonight, we're looking at the third of the trilogy in the wrong order. It's one of those things that, you know, if you ever read the story about how the railroad tracks got to be a certain width or something that, you know, it goes back to the days of the horse and buggy, stuff like that. My mistake will be forever enshrined in the in the curriculum of New Geneva now, so I've got those two books out of order. I don't think it's too serious of a mistake. I was trying to remember which one was actually written first. We'll get to that next time, but at any rate, Escape from Reason, seven chapters, fairly short, and what I wanted to do this evening, instead of trying to just plow through and give a synopsis of the material, is be a little more selective and try to generate some discussion points around what we've read. So this will complete the third of the trilogy. We don't necessarily have to confine our discussion to this particular book because there's a fair amount of overlap in all three. So that's how we're going to approach this. I asked you to give some thought to the kind of ideas or points that jumped out at you as you read through this. And why don't we start there and see what happens. So I'm going to start here in the classroom with Randy and say, what do you think? I found myself kind of questioning Yeah, man's will and man's mind. I spent time just kind of questioning over and over again, and it's because he kept referring back to Aquinas. So here is Aquinas, and he's saying that Aquinas opened the door to this break of nature and grace. But it sounded to me like he was saying that the change in art, for instance, shouldn't have happened. And Aquinas was to blame for that. He was talking about Byzantine art and the holy nature of portraiture and things like that. And all of a sudden we're getting more normal representations. But did he really mean to sound like you know, the Virgin Mary ought to look all angelic, and the angels ought to look all feminine, and Jesus ought to be, maybe all as a baby, or, you know, just, did he want to state that modern art shouldn't have come into being? Or was he just, it was just kind of a broad-brushed argument that... Yeah, well, it seems odd, that, you know, he's saying that there was a distinction between the upper and the lower story and that spiritual upper story was depicted in a more spiritual way. But how do we know how to depict that anyway? Doesn't that seem like kind of an odd question? Is it surprising that we would start to imitate what we think is spiritual by virtue of what we see in nature? Maybe that's a better way of saying what I tried to say, that it was spiritualized representation, and you're right, we don't know how accurate it is. And is it wrong to have... I mean, even some of the very finest some of the romantic painters that we talked about with John Leaf last semester. Where they've got these, well one of the things he pointed out was man above nature. So here's a guy up on the mountaintop and he's looking out over the valley. He's, he's the, he's, he's overseeing nature. But still, these flat things that were going on in the first three to five, six, seven centuries of artwork. It started to take on more depth and perspective. Yeah. And the breaking up or the overtaking of nature and grace may have happened anyway as part of a natural evolution of culture maybe naturally becoming less Christianized. Aristotle probably spread, some of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought spread and schools picked that up. It wasn't all a Christian world. So maybe it was going to happen anyway. Although I do Aquinas and saying that man's mind was unfallen, or at least less fallen. Yeah, so Schaeffer's going to carry through that idea and say it opened the door to despair by placing too much emphasis on man's rational capacity. Yeah. That's the one thing I And that's part of what we're trying to get at. At this point, I hope it's the case that we're looking and thinking a little more critically about what we're reading and starting to say, hmm, does everything fit together as nicely as we might like it to? OK? How about contestant number two in Southern California? So taking off on Randy's springboard, How do we critique 3,020 pages of Summa Theologica with eight pages on Thomas? How do we do that? And even the Summa of the Summa alone is 500 pages. And he writes about all kinds of different subjects that deal with theology, deals with You know, I mean, things that people study today, the existence of God, the simplicity of God, God in all things, His immutability, His names, His knowledge, His will, His love, His providence, cosmology, anthropology, epistemology, essence of the soul, the will, its free will, you know, how the soul perceives ethics. And people study it today, and very devout people study it today. And they don't go off and fly off of the track. They seem to present a godly life, a sanctified life. I'm wondering if we should ascribe the boogeyman of history to the Suma. And I'm thinking maybe we're overstepping a bit by saying that. We have Shimabuoy, we have Gioti that begin to paint based on what Thomas said in the Summa. We don't even know if they read the Summa. Of course, we know ideas trickle down, but this does presuppose an interwovenness of the humanities that I think has to be on a much grander scale than it was. Remember the fall began with Adam and Eve not with Thomas Aquinas. That's a good point. And nature was assaulted of grace, nature assaulted grace then. Would you say that Schaeffer's basic summation of Aquinas, of this difference in the fall between the will and the intellect, is that an accurate statement of what he taught? one that you took that with early church history yeah okay so he brought it up then i think our reading also included it okay and of course you know the woman bearing her breast in who posed for that uh picture of the virgin um like randy was saying those things could have happened anyways. Because man has a fall in nature. You don't have to read Thomas Aquinas. You don't even have to be sitting in the pew of the Catholic Church. I sat in the pew during my early stages of life and I had no cognizance of what was being said because until Vatican II it was all in Latin anyway. I used to just climb under the seat and turn on this Eli, what do you think? Well, I don't know. So which question would you like me to answer? Something that I thought was valuable, or do you want me to bring up your team? Yeah, what kind of big takeaway or big concern that came to the surface for you? I don't know. I want to be fair. It was a bit of a new idea to me that he sees that some of these artists of the mid-20th century who were incorporating a lot of, I'll just say, obscenity into their art, whether it's pornography into their books or whatever, that he saw some of that as a recognition that this is where philosophy was headed, that people were basically becoming more and more crass in the way that they were trying to spiritualize things of life. And so he's saying that some of these people, basically they're just taking it to its conclusion, not necessarily because they thought that had value, but more to show that it didn't have value. Now, I don't know that everybody that's done that with art had that view, but it was just interesting to think that some of them may have had that view in mind. So, I thought that was kind of interesting. In the notes there in Chapter 5, he makes a comment about contemporary art as being ugly, and that without knowing it, the artists are expressing the fallenness of man. Yeah. I don't know. I guess related to what it seems like people have been talking about. You know, I could say, for example, I don't know, people will probably get mad at me, but try and listen to what I'm saying. They can't get you from here, though. You know, C.S. Lewis, I think at the beginning of his book, Mere Christianity, makes a point to say, I am not a theologian. But then he proceeds to write at length about theology. And so there's a danger in that people think that C.S. Lewis really knows theology because he talks about it in such a comprehensive seeming way, when really he doesn't. His theology was actually pretty poor. So, you know, I guess that's where I wonder if some of the critiques of Schaeffer come from. He clearly, as you said, has a very broad knowledge of many areas, and that has the ability sometimes to draw out insights that people may not come to if they are specialized in one particular area. But I think a lot of his critics, they were trying to be nice. What they're sort of saying, I think, is he doesn't know what he's really talking about. But they're trying to say that in a way that's kind of... Charitable. Well, he's not really a scholar, so what can you expect? So I guess I kind of get that sense in a lot of these books that he reuses the same examples over and over in his different... Well, they're all speeches, I guess, is where they started. And so the part of me that's always looking for problems, which is kind of my day job, You know little warning flags start to go up where I go Is his depth of knowledge really as deep as it sounds or or did he just pick a few things? You know and it's really hammering on those doesn't mean he's wrong it just And and I would say part of the answer to that is yes, he obviously has I Would put it like this that he was in the middle of the battle which was first of all liberalism and then secondly neo-orthodoxy he did engage in a few other skirmishes especially later in life with the sanctity of life but in one sense we could say he was I don't think it's unfair to say that he was fairly specialized in terms of the battle that he was Yeah, I think if we keep in mind the battle that he was really fighting, that I think helps to keep things in the right perspective. Yeah. And the other thing, I could ask the question like this. I'm putting on my critics hat, my cynics hat now. If we were going to build a systematic theology from Schaeffer's teaching, would we have enough information to do that? And I find it a little wanting, let's say, that he's obviously defending Christianity as truth and the importance of reason and evidence, the importance of scripture, both natural revelation and inspired revelation. But he would have a hard time building a systematic theology out of the bits and pieces that he was working on during his lifetime. That's kind of how I would describe it at this point. He refers to Westminster on a fair number of occasions. He talks about being in the reformed stream. But he would also say, if he were pressed on it, that he would be more evangelical, probably, than Reformed. Just as he would say he's more interested in evangelism than he is in apologetics, per se. When I questioned his I wasn't to say that I don't think he's right. Because it, and maybe some of his, some of his stuff came from Ruckmacher. Because Ruckmacher's book is, Modern Art and the Death of Culture. And, and in more detail, Ruckmacher will go from the early art as, as representation So there is a progression. Those things really are there. So, whether he entered the freeway on the right exit ramp, or the right entrance ramp is, it's good discussion, but at the same time, I think his overall road map is pretty good to say, yes, there was this change. There was an escape from reason. We legitimately can say that. So, like what he's done. Yeah, as you're describing this, and you know, he describes the flow of philosophy through the various institutions. You know, one of the points, and this is a point in Chapter 3, he talks about the importance of cause and effect. And elsewhere he talks about the chain of events that, you know, we live in a world that is governed by cause and effect. So it would make sense from that framework to suppose that if something changes in this area and then you see a change in another area, that there's a relationship between those. Thank you, Thomas Aquinas. All right. Possibly. Maybe others. But you know what? That downward Romans chapter 1 spiral takes place in all of life. That's abandoning God. Yeah, and as you said, it ultimately started with a fall. I think we could see hints even in the early chapters of Genesis, Genesis 4 specifically, that as we go from Cain and felt bad about it, a few generations we have Lamech who murders a guy for apparently not much of a reason and is so proud of himself he writes a song. He has no fear of retribution and apparently no sense of guilt for it. First murder ballad? First one recorded in scripture anyway. Might not have been the first one ever, but it was the first one recorded for us. Yeah, there are obviously cycles to man's depravity. And when I'm looking for reasons to be encouraged by the events that we're watching unfold around us today, it's the understanding that, as the old Latin expression is, that after darkness there will be light. And when it gets really dark, that's usually when there's some kind of a revival of the gospel. So that's typically how history is gonna flow. And I suppose that in various cycles of that, we could point to different chains of events. So he seems to be using Aquinas as kind of the starting point over these last almost thousand years. One of the questions that I struggle with a little bit, especially from the early chapters to the late chapters, is the question of how he views man in his fallenness. Anybody else pick up on that? In other words, he will say that man still has value in his fallenness. He's not nothing. He still has some nobility. But what is, how would we describe the value of fallen man? Well that was all taken care of in RS 541. The culture, the builders of culture. We talked about all of that, man's virtues, build culture, erect a society, and make many vestiges of his lights and perfections that are still remnant in him, even in spite of the fall. And that goes for unbelieving man. So there's still dignity and value intrinsic to man even after the fall, and even if he's really, really fallen. Wouldn't we say that? We talked about common grace. Wouldn't we argue that, especially from a pro-life standpoint, we don't uphold the sanctity of unborn life if we think it has the potential to grow up and become reformed? You know, my view, which I don't know if it's significantly different, I guess, than what Schaefer's trying to say or not, but the value of man is tied to man's being created in the image of God. And so, because of God's grace, we continue to see some reflection of that. It's not really because there's some kind of inherent value in mankind after the fall, all mankind really ought to be destroyed, done away with, floods should have gotten everybody. But because of God's grace, he continues to show his image in man and tells us that we should treat man accordingly. After the fall, maybe we should think about it in terms of what man still has the potential to be. He might be a menace to society. He might indeed end up under judgment. But as long as man is alive, he still has the potential, through the power of regeneration, to be reunited spiritually to his creator, to what he was originally before he fell. to worship him forever. That's correct. One of the comments I put under chapter two here, quoting from Schaefer, modern man sees his relationship downward to the animal and to the machine. And I was just reading an article today about something called speciesism. Heard of that? Here's a quick definition from the all-knowing, all-seeing internet. It is the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals. And what does that kind of an idea lead to, somewhat naturally? I'm probably asking the wrong audience. You're probably all meat eaters, aren't you? You know what? I dealt with these kind of people. I worked with these kind of people for 28 years. And I already know that it is upside down logic where the lower forms of life can assume priority. Anything with a face, anything that, you know, You know, I mean, it's like this is this is topsy-turvy And of course, we've all heard the saying, you know save the wells But let let the babies die and you know, of course, I knew people that Would definitely in fact, I knew people that would say save the dog if your neighbor and His dog fell in the pool, which one would you save Wow? No, there was a survey. People say, oh, I'd pull the dog out for sure. So I mean, yeah, it's not based on a Christian assumption that man is, like Eli said, created in the image and like this God. He's like the rest of the beasts and he has no more value. Everything has its rights. Animals have their rights. People have their rights. And we're not to mix and match those things. So even in regard of those things that make us distinctly human from all the rest of the animals and all the rest of the creation, those end up going out the window when it comes to Fido's rights. Here's a response against Platonism that Schaeffer mentions in chapter 2. See if this kind of hits you sideways the way it did me. He says, the soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important. Doesn't make me squeamish. You know it's we believe He said don't fear him that can destroy the body But fear him who can just after he's destroyed the body can destroy the soul in hell Not that God does discounts our body. He will resurrect it It's it's part of the deal a part of redemption but the soul has a primary focus in his sight. What is it? Profit if you gain this whole material world and lose your soul. Okay. Randy? 1 Corinthians 15 and then the Acumenical Creed talk about we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Let me look at this again. Yeah, maybe I could grant some squeamishness there, but I think one of the things he's trying to do, perhaps maybe he's taken a long way around, is to recognize the soul and the body are together. They're meant to be... Yeah, man is more than just physical. Yes, we do need to pay attention to the fact that there is an eternal immaterial aspect to man. He's reacting against a tendency towards neoplatonism that tends to minimize the importance of the body. And that, unfortunately, is some aspect of contemporary evangelicalism. Yeah, we call it carnal Christianity, right? It doesn't matter what we do, as long as our soul is saved. Chapter 3 starts talking about science again. He says, Christianity gives us certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect. The object and history and cause and effect really exist. This fits into his framework because of his emphasis on both reason and proofs, right? How does this work as a starting point then? What is still being assumed here? and then think about the limits of positivism that we were considering last time around. Did you say reason and proofs? Yeah, top of page seven. I thought you said fruits. Christianity gives us a certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect. The object and history and cause and effect really exist. Can we build science on that? Schaefer said we could. The object of our study is real. The previous prior study and investigation really happened and those things that result are real. We can come to understand, what he said a number of times, we can come to understand Yeah We can act into the universe. Yes, and Johnny made the world of secondary causes tertiary causes contingent causes cause and effect God is the one who put this all together for the purpose of our existence It's made it's it's the metaphysics of it's where we are it's the universe One of the things I thought was interesting, and it kind of connects to this, so that's why I'm bringing it up, is, I think he was talking about Franz Bacon, and saying that there was a real fall. And it affected all men. Those can be recovered and philosophy, I think he said, too, and then the mind by science and learning. So, and Francis Bacon, I don't think was being, I don't think he was following Aquinas. I think he was close to what, I was reading it as being close to what Schaeffer was saying, is that man does, can still act into the universe around him. which excludes man being just a machine and part of the machinery, right? So that he has freedom. And this chapter he talks about the idea that civilization is seen as a constraint. And so it leads to somewhat tongue in cheek, the bohemian ideal, the idea of autonomous freedom without restraint. And we end up with the morality of the Marquis de Sade that what is, is right. I might argue that that's too complicated. What is, is. That's basically what he's trying to say. been said, but that has been said outside of Schaefer. What is, is. It just is, right? Why should we put a word on it that tries to assign some moral value to it? Didn't Marquis de Sade, wasn't he into, what do we call it, masochism, sadism, what no, sadism? Right. Yeah, what's the difference? I don't know. When you hurt yourself, that's a sadist. And masochism is when you like to hurt others. Yeah. Masochism is self-harm. Sadism is taking pleasure from hurting someone else. He did it in a very perverse sexual way, too. Yeah, not surprising. Schaefer talks about how mass medias contributed greatly to the spread of this new way of thinking. And that's true, but doesn't it require us to consume what's being said without really thinking carefully about it? I could say this is Leland's fault because all of this stuff comes out of Hollywood. You know what? You ought to take a look at what's going on in Colorado right now, my friend. I try not to pay attention to the news. You guys are falling off the face of the earth. Ever since you moved to Colorado. Yeah, you need to hear what Randy just said because I agree with him. It's not because of people like me who come from Texas. It's because of people who come from California. Think about education. He mentions education. No, the only person you got going for you in Colorado was a born bober. OK. OK. I don't put much stock in any politician, wherever they might claim to be on the political spectrum. I've watched too many change. So think of education as a conduit. Think about how in the last couple of years It's coming more and more up to the surface of what is going on in our schools and our public libraries in terms of attempting to indoctrinate young children from a very young age before they've started to develop some moral discernment into all kinds unimaginable perversions that in previous generations we couldn't have even dreamt of. It's been going on for a couple decades that they're pushing for a year-round school as well. Yeah, why is that? They want our kids. Yeah, the state seems to think they own our children. And isn't that part of that same worldview? But if we allow them to, they will. Of course. We're going to have to fight them all along the way because they're determined to fight for what they believe. I'm not sure our culture has the will to fight anymore. They fight it pretty well in Florida. Yeah, maybe in spots. So let's look at a couple of points from chapter four. This is where he says Bart will separate religious truth from historical truth. What kind of difficulty does that cause for us in terms of hermeneutics in a broad sense? Haven't heard from Eli in a while. Separating religious truth from historical truth. Well, I mean, you know, it tends, I think, towards spiritualizing everything. So you end up potentially misinterpreting portions of scripture that really are meant to be understood literally. But, you know, Barth, his approach was, yeah, it might be historical, but really there's this spiritual significance to the statement that has nothing to do with whether it was historical. dangerous road. Something I notice about scripture starting in Genesis is that much of the doctrine that we get from scripture comes to us through the history. So what if we start getting rid of the history? We're getting rid of the conduit by which much of that doctrine is going to come to us. The whole Bible is not written like the books of Romans and Hebrews. But even so, those books are still relying on a great deal of history to make those points. This is an expression that I caught this time that I haven't, I didn't remember seeing this in Schaefer before among his funny sayings. In talking about optimistic evolutionary humanism, saying that it has no rational foundation, that its hope is rooted in the leap of manana. We're just going to push our hope to tomorrow. I guess it's like the song from Annie. Even if we didn't have a good reason to believe it today, we'll just wait, and tomorrow we'll answer it. And from the worldview class, somehow. Right. Somehow. We don't know how. But at least we admit we don't know everything, but we have that optimism that is grounded in nothing. That kind of like is like Julian Huxley, this optimistic humanism. It's like if I were to rephrase his thesis here, there is a God, but no God is he. In other words, we should we should hold on to the fact of the idea of belief in a God, even though there isn't one because it has a Yeah, it's just a pragmatic argument for some kind of religious belief. It's funny that there's even a pragmatic argument for religious belief. In chapter five, this certainly jumped out to my eyes. He's quoting from Terry Southern, who wrote a book called Writers in Revolt, where he makes the argument that man is only psychologically oriented with the result that, quote, there is no such thing as crime. It destroys the idea of crime. How does that sound like the way things are going right now with defund the police and let's let nonviolent offenders out of jail and let's not prosecute crimes, property crimes that are less than $1,000 and so forth? How is that going for us? It's not going well. At the very least, I'd say that defunding police, etc. They are going there. One begins to suspect that chaos is the objective, or at least the short term objective, with a longer term objective of having to institute a little more forceful kind of government. In chapter 6 he talks about the loss of categories I summarize it like this, that if there's no antithesis, then there are no categories, then there are no distinctions, and then there's no discernment. And then just like that, we're right back to the moral framework of Dessau. Whatever is, is right. It talks about some mystical kinds of Christianity. It ought to be very troubling to us to see how Christ is turned into kind of a mystical good luck charm or something along those lines. That what matters is an encounter with Jesus, but how is that any different than the final experience that Jaspers suggested? And then if we bring it into a little more contemporary, we're not so much in the Jesus movement today as we were 50 years ago, but today it's about the Spirit, isn't it? And how many churches are trying to find that experience of the Holy Spirit? And are we just making ourselves modern mystics by doing that? And then we end up with a place where we use the word Jesus, but we're also using it to justify evil. We're using Jesus to say, you know, we're fighting for women's rights, for example. And you know what that means. In the last chapter, he draws the obvious conclusion that if we have no basis for morality, we have no basis for law, that means there's In effect, no problem of evil anymore because we can't define it. And we also end up in a place where there's really no reason for evangelization. He does come back to the necessity of scripture for understanding who Jesus is. He is not just a mystical experience. And repeatedly he says that Jesus is the Lord of all life, including intellectual life. Here's one of the things that I'll have to leave you with this time is the question that he raises that man not only can but should start with himself. Christianity is a system that requires man to start with himself and provides the basis for it. That seems like a point where we're going to draw some criticism because of the fallenness of man. You made a similar point on your outline of the first chapter. That one says, does Schaeffer make the same mistake as Aquinas by relying so much on reason and evidence? Also, to sum up to it, I think maybe to more of a at least the way he speaks and writes, he sounds more like a presuppositionalist. So he talks about the presuppositions we start with, and yet he's... I'm not clear exactly what he's... what's all behind that. Yeah, I think what we're going to find is that when Schaefer uses the word presupposition, he doesn't mean what Van Til means when he uses the word presupposition. So... kind of be on the lookout for that. Most apologists say you cannot arrive at Trinitarian theism through teleological apologetics. And Schaeffer kind of just butts it up on the end there and says, okay, you know, this teleological presupposition leads us to Christian theism. The teleological argument leads you to the fact that there's evidence for a god, but it doesn't lead you to the fact right directly to Christian Trinitarian theism. That's a criticism of Schaeffer, of your apologists. And I would probably say the same thing from what I know of classical apologetics. It may get you to theism, but it doesn't necessarily get you to the God of the Bible. And so, Bantill comes along and says, that's why we have to start with the God of the Bible and with Scripture. Okay, our time has come to a conclusion. I am going to ask Eli to have the last word tonight by dismissing our class in prayer. Would you do that for us, please? All right. Well, Heavenly Father, when you look at how much there really is to say about humanity and how it relates to you, it's such a deep topic that we really need your wisdom in order to be able to understand it rightly. And thank you that you have giving wisdom to various people at various times so that they could raise questions. And I pray that you would help us to also be asking the right questions and thinking about how this would affect our ministry as we're here waiting for that time when we are brought fully in your presence. So I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.